


Reverse Psychology

by Jayne L (JayneL)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 13:11:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/662377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayneL/pseuds/Jayne%20L
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ruby hadn't always been a witch.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reverse Psychology

**Author's Note:**

> elliemurasaki prompted: "I miss Ruby. Write me Ruby! Um: clock." Clock led me to time, which led me to the passage of time, which led me to origin stories.

Ruby hadn't always been a witch.

First she was a girl, daughter of a father she never knew, of a mother widowed in the plague that crept on silent rats' feet through their village when Ruby was barely two years old. Ruby survived, and Ruby's mother survived, but Ruby's father's body was stacked with the other dead on a cart and burned in a field while their priest shouted absolution over the crackling flames.

That was the first evidence against them.

She wasn't a witch when she was twelve, when their neighbours' suspicions finally hardened into hate and her mother, who had never remarried, was dragged from home to court to stake. She wasn't a witch when the magistrate and his wife stood with her at the front of the crowd gathered to watch her mother burn, pillars of cold righteousness that faced her forward and wouldn't let her look away.

Ruby's mother hadn't been a witch, either. And she was not the only one to burn.

Ruby became a witch in the long grasses of the heretics' graveyard, at the centre of a cross scratched into the dirt with her own clawed hands, anointed with her own blood and tears and anger. There, she asked the black-eyed woman who answered her summons to help her stop the executions.

The woman agreed. For ten years, Ruby was her village's only killer.

Centuries later--millennia later, as time passed in Hell--it was Ruby who was summoned. "His name is Sam Winchester," Lilith said, showing her Azazel's chosen. "He's a hunter."

Ruby didn't need to hear anything more.


End file.
